Live Blogging: Booth Escape Route Tour

Today (4/27/13), I will be on the John Wilkes Booth Escape Route Tour put on by the Surratt House museum. I’ve decided to try my hands at “live blogging” the tour, which essentially means I will be adding pictures to this post throughout the day as we visit the different places. If there are any particular things you would like a picture of, comment below and I’ll be happy to oblige. I’m hoping my phone won’t run out of battery with all the picture taking and uploading, but it might happen. So if the tour just ends for awhile, you’ll know why. Check back periodically today for updates!

Here we go:

6:22 am: I am on my way to Surratt House early to await and facilitate the tour participants’ check in.

6:31 am:

Two of the large bookshelves that line an office at the Surratt House Museum. If you need a book on the assassination, odds are the Surratt House gift shop has it.

7:23 am:

The bus has left Surratt House filled with the tour group and our esteemed tour guide, John Howard, sets the scene as we drive into DC.

8:00 am:

We’re outside of Ford’s Theatre listening to Ranger Eric Martin give a speech about the history of the Theatre.

8:15 am:

Inside the Ford’s Theatre Museum.

8:45 am:

In the theatre of Ford’s listening to Ranger Eric Martin give the account of the assassination and peering into the presidential box.

9:05 am:

A quick walk through of Petersen House. I was helping some tour participants through so I didn’t take any pictures inside.

9:23 am:

Drive bys of Baptist Alley, the route Booth took out of Ford’s, and the former site of the Herndon House, where Lewis Powell stayed.

9:27 am:

Drive by of the Surratt boarding house in D.C.

9:35 am:

Drive by of David Herold’s possible house in the Navy Yard and taking the bridge that runs parallel to the former Navy Yard bridge.

9:57 am:

The approximate location of Sopher’s hill where Booth and Davy met up after fleeing DC separately.

10:10 am:

At the Mary Surratt House Museum in Clinton, MD, the organizers of this and countless other BERTs.

Surratt House employee Kyle Mongan about to give a tour. No pictures of the inside of the house because I’m spending our time at Surratt charging my phone battery in my car otherwise I won’t make it much past Mudd’s.

11:27 am:

The small crossroad town of T.B. through which Booth and Herold rode through after leaving the Surratt Tavern.

11:46 am:

Farm of George Gardiner, next door neighbor of Dr. Mudd’s, from whom Booth bought a horse blind in one eye.

11:50 am:

The Dr. Mudd House Museum in Waldorf, MD.

1:03 pm:

Drive by of Bryantown Tavern, where Dr. Mudd came and learned of Lincoln’s assassination on April 15th while Booth was at his home.

1:07 pm:

Drive by of Mudd’s grave at St. Mary’s church, where Mudd met Booth in 1864.

1:23 pm:

Drive by of Rich Hill, the home of Samuel Cox.

1:25 pm:

Drive by of the pine thicket where Booth and Herold were hid by Thomas Jones.

1:34 pm:

Time for lunch at Captain Billy’s. I’ll see you after.

3:15 pm:

After a short delay due to a broken broiler at Captain Billy’s, we’ve made it to Loyola Retreat, the location of where Booth and Herold set across the Potomac.

There’s no way you can take a photo of the LIncoln chair from the back! I wish we could have but we
did the best we could. We were told there were no Booth tours so we left yesterday. I do have a tape recorder, would have loved this, that’s how much you can count on the rangers. Ruined my trip to know there was a tour that no one told us about. I wanted to see Tudor Hall as well. This is very depressing. WE did take a lot of videos and stills and will spend the day downloading them. Washington is no place to be when every school in the country is everywhere, screaming and shouting. We had our photos taken with one of those statues inside, don’t know which ones, I thought
they were generic, but they did have a LIncoln one. WEll twice in 4 weeks, should not have told us this we sure can’t go again anytime soon.

Don’t be upset. The tour is not organized by Ford’s Theatre. It is run by the Surratt House Museum. They do a number of guided bus tours in the spring and fall. They sell out quickly as there is a great demand in it. When you have time, contact the museum and put yourself on the mailing list for future tours.

Also, Tudor Hall is very far away from D.C. It would be a separate trip altogether to go there. Plan ahead for that as they are only open a couple Saturdays a month. Check out the Spirits of Tudor Hall Facebook page for more info.

As director of Surratt House, I’m especially enjoying the photos and also the time stamp so that I can make sure that the tour is staying on time!

Rich Smyth forgot to mention that he is the inspiration and co-author of the book that Jim is hawking at Ford’s. It’s an excellent compilation and brief history of where people related to the assassination story are buried with Washington, D.C.

One last thing: As I looked at the photo of the interior of the Presidential Box at Ford’s, I was reminded again how tiny the two boxes were, even when made into one box. It is amazing to me that Booth did not break his fibula on the sofa leg or at least the runners of the rocker!

Inquiring minds want to know – How did you manage to snap photos of the interior of Mudd House. I have fielded so many complaints over the years about photography being verboten inside. Did you bribe someone? Wait for the guide to go to the next room before snapping the photo?

You took the Lincoln Box with a phone? WE tried 5 or 6 times, no way to get that from that position
unless they did you a favor but that’s how I saw it years ago. Yes I know I’ve seen the Lincoln chair at
Henry’s Museum. Too bad they can’t be in the same place. I guess I was right, those rangers don’t
know a thing about other tours. Took my two Washington vacations so I won’t be seeing any other
tours for a long time, I can’t stand traveling in the heat of summer. IN fact, they told us those stairs that
Mr. Lincoln went up, the ones on the post cards, that they were real and no one was allowed to go
up there, come on, how can anything be real when we all know the place fell apart many years ago and killed a lot of people. So jealous, it’s awful when you know more than the tour guides. I’m no expert
have not dug into the small details yet, but anyone interested in this I think would know more than
they do.

Hi Mr. Classick, Laurie Verge from the Surratt House here: The best time to visit the D.C. area is actually near the end of September, when school kids and tourists have gone home. We also run our Booth Escape Route Tours in September — also April and May.

As for the stairs at Ford’s, it is my understanding that the family circle is off limits to regular visitors during peak tourist months because of monitoring weight limitations. It is nothing for the Rangers to deal with up to 7000 people a day. That’s a tremendous amount of wear-and-tear on any structure.

On our Booth Tours, we go through red-tape paperwork and pay for permits to get into the theatre early before the doors open to the public so that we can have the privilege of a “personal tour.” We have worked with the NPS and the staff of Rangers since 1977, and they and their volunteers are usually very accommodating. It’s little perqs like that that make our bus tours so popular. I do hope that you will be able to travel with us sometime in the fairly near future. I don’t see these tours dying out anytime soon.

Seriously, I could meet the bus at Garrett’s Farm as it’s only about 35-40 minutes from my house – Wish I could join you all! What a gloriously wonderfully beautiful day ya’ll have! The photos are superb!

Just for the record: you are welcome to visit the house here at any time for as long as you would like (and as often as you would like) from sometime this summer (post-July) on. At the moment, Suzanne (who is in Florida until June) and I are in the throes of moving furniture from her/our (recently sold) condo in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia to the house here for staging to take down to a recently-purchased house in Fort Myers, Florida. Current result: the inside of the Bryantown house here very much resembles a shipping warehouse. When the furniture and boxes moves are completed, one will then be able to sit down here again.

I have some (easy-to-peruse) file books here of items re the history of the Bryantown Tavern (and other Lincoln assassination-related topics) that you might enjoy looking over.

I believe that Dave took that photo on Old Branch Avenue where Linda Lane cuts into it from Route 5. As best as we have been able to determine, Soper’s Hill was very near to where the Capital Beltway (I-95) now crosses over Maryland Route 5/Branch Avenue (just south of Marlow Heights). Old Branch Avenue is actually part of the 1850 New Cut Road. The construction of the Beltway cut it in half, but parts of the original road still exist north of the Beltway crossing.

I can’t remember the name of the subdivision that was built in that area in the 1950s, but it is near Middleton Lane, an Episcopal Church, what used to be a Frank’s landscaping shop, etc. Manchester Estates is on the opposite side of dual-lane Route 5 from the Linda Lane cut-off. When we turn left from Linda Lane onto Old Branch, the site of Pyles Lumberyard (now gone) is about a mile south where Allentown crosses Old Branch.

The Soper’s owned a mill in that area during the 1860s, and there were still descendants in the area of Forestville when I was teaching at the junior high there in the 1960s-70s. There was also an old Soper cemetery at that time that was sitting high and dry in the middle of a gravel pit. I have no idea what happened to the graves, but that area is now the terminus for the Green Line of the Metro.

Dave & Kate’s Speaking Engagements in 2019

Want to come heckle BoothieBarn authors Dave & Kate Taylor in person? Here are some of our public speaking engagements planned for the future.

Date: Saturday, April 6, 2019Location: Perryville branch of the Cecil County Library (500 Coudon Blvd. Perryville, MD 21903)Time: 1:00 pmmSpeech: The Making of an Assassin: The History of John Wilkes BoothSpeaker: Dave TaylorDescription: How did John Wilkes Booth go from celebrated actor to villainous assassin? In his speech, Dave will recount the life of John Wilkes Booth and what led him to the Presidential box at Ford’s Theatre.Cost: Free

Date: Wednesday, April 10, 2019Location: Lynchburg Civil War Round Table (4009 Murray Place, Lynchburg, Virginia 24501)Time: 7:45 pmSpeech: The Making of an Assassin: The History of John Wilkes BoothSpeaker: Dave TaylorDescription: How did John Wilkes Booth go from celebrated actor to villainous assassin? In his speech, Dave will recount the life of John Wilkes Booth and what led him to the Presidential box at Ford’s Theatre.Cost: Cost for the talk is $5. Guests are also welcome to come for the buffet dinner starting at 7:00 pm but the cost for that is $25. Information can be found at: https://www.historicsandusky.org/lcwrt

Date: Sunday, May 5, 2019Location: Thomas Stone National Historic Site (6655 Rose Hill Rd, Port Tobacco, MD 20677)Time: TBDSpeech: Frederick Stone: A Life of Service and SecretsSpeaker: Dave TaylorDescription: Frederick Stone was the great nephew of Thomas Stone, one of the Maryland signers of the Declaration of Independence. Though he never knew his illustrious relative, Frederick lived for a time at his great uncle’s estate of Haber-de-venture before being educated in the law. His lifetime of public service would lead him from lawyer to commissioner to delegate to judge. Along the way, however, Frederick Stone became involved in one of the most traumatic events in our nation’s history: the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. In his speech, researcher Dave Taylor will explore the life of Frederick Stone and the secrets he carried with him about the death of Abraham Lincoln.Cost: Free

Date: Sunday, June 2, 2019Location: Tudor Hall (17 Tudor Ln, Bel Air, MD 21015)Time: 2:00 pmSpeech: “Born Under an Unlucky Star”: The Childhood of John Wilkes BoothSpeaker: Dave TaylorDescription: In this speech, Dave will examine the boyhood of John Wilkes Booth – his familial relationships, his time growing up at Tudor Hall and in Baltimore, and his early education. More information can be found at: http://spiritsoftudorhall.blogspot.com/2016/11/make-plans-to-visit-tudor-hall-in-2017_7.htmlCost: $5.00 cash for the talk and a tour of Tudor Hall

Date: Sunday, July 7, 2019Location: Tudor Hall (17 Tudor Ln, Bel Air, MD 21015)Time: 2:00 pmSpeech: “Brides of Bluebeard”: The Women Who Loved John Wilkes BoothSpeaker: Kate TaylorDescription: John Wilkes Booth was a Romeo both on and off the stage. In her speech, Kate will address some of the romantic relationships that defined the handsome actor who went on to assassinate President Lincoln. More information can be found at: http://spiritsoftudorhall.blogspot.com/2016/11/make-plans-to-visit-tudor-hall-in-2017_7.htmlCost: $5.00 cash for the talk and a tour of Tudor Hall

Date: Sunday, September 15, 2019Location: Tudor Hall (17 Tudor Ln, Bel Air, MD 21015)Time: 2:00 pmSpeech: “Brides of Bluebeard”: The Women Who Loved John Wilkes BoothSpeaker: Kate TaylorDescription: John Wilkes Booth was a Romeo both on and off the stage. In her speech, Kate will address some of the romantic relationships that defined the handsome actor who went on to assassinate President Lincoln. More information can be found at: http://spiritsoftudorhall.blogspot.com/2016/11/make-plans-to-visit-tudor-hall-in-2017_7.htmlCost: $5.00 cash for the talk and a tour of Tudor Hall

Date: Sunday, October 13, 2019Location: Tudor Hall (17 Tudor Ln, Bel Air, MD 21015)Time: 2:00 pmSpeech: “Born Under an Unlucky Star”: The Childhood of John Wilkes BoothSpeaker: Dave TaylorDescription: In this speech, Dave will examine the boyhood of John Wilkes Booth – his familial relationships, his time growing up at Tudor Hall and in Baltimore, and his early education. More information can be found at: http://spiritsoftudorhall.blogspot.com/2016/11/make-plans-to-visit-tudor-hall-in-2017_7.htmlCost: $5.00 cash for the talk and a tour of Tudor Hall